In this heartwarming middle-grade novel, summer is here, and Taylor and her best friend, Carey, have planned “makeover” missions. Each girl has chosen one thing in her life she wants, no needs, to change before seventh grade begins in their new junior high. Taylor wants to change her name, a relic from an ancient relative revered by her father.

But when Taylor’s long-lost Aunt Julie appears out of the blue with her 15-year-old daughter, Tate, everything changes. Taylor suddenly has more missions and lots of questions. Who is this quirky Tate? Why did Aunt Julie really leave, and why has she returned? And why won’t her parents let her shape her own destiny?

With a little help from her grandfather, a key moral compass in her life, and his reminder to “treasure the trees,” Taylor finds some answers. Friendships and family ties are stretched, but connection and courage save the day for everyone. By the end of the summer, Taylor has discovered much more than a new cousin.

This first novel has won an Indie book award and applause from parents, teachers, and ‘tween’ readers. Readers follow Taylor and Carey through a summer of expanding family relationships, building self-confidence, and navigating the ups and downs of friendship.

Ann Anthony writes fiction and non-fiction and teaches college-level writing. She loves to help students of all ages become happy readers and writers.

Embroidery and Sacred Text introduces new designs in Judaic and Biblical embroidery. Erudite and insightful commentary adds a spiritual dimension for appreciating the designs. Braun shares forty embroidery motifs for fellow needle artists, along with ten new embroidery alphabets in Hebrew and English. A chapter explaining the mathematical considerations in embroidery design provides clear, accessible explanations of how geometric and algebraic factors underlie embroidery patterns.

Rachel Braun’s sabbatical project yields a treasury of embroidery, combining the precision of a mathematical mind with the spiritual depth of a true artist. Her embroideries comment on Torah texts and the experience of the Israelites in the wilderness. Rachel’s embroideries walk us deeper into the texts, and her brilliant commentaries open up the “blackwork” that underlies her creative vision. For anyone curious about how art, mathematics, and Judaics can be gloriously woven together, this book is a delight.

—Rabbi Gilah Langner

Rachel Braun’s embroidery design fuses intellect and spirituality with the visual beauty and sensual pleasure of the fiber arts. … I particularly appreciate her remarkable use of mathematics in blackwork embroidery patterns to embody and express profound Jewish thought. What a pleasure to sink the hands and eyes into this elegant work!

Patty Dann is the author of three novels: Starfish, Mermaids, and Sweet & Crazy. She has also published two memoirs, The Goldfish Went on Vacation: A Memoir of Loss (and Learning to Tell the Truth about It) and The Baby Boat: A Memoir of Adoption. Her work has been translated into French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. Mermaids was made into a movie starring Cher, Winona Ryder, and Christina Ricci.

Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, Christian Science Monitor, O, the Oprah Magazine, the Oregon Quarterly; Redbook, More, ForbesWoman; Poets & Writers Magazine, Writer’s Handbook, Dirt: Quirks, Habits; and Passions of Keeping House, and This I Believe: On Motherhood.

Maxie Dash married for wealth and security. To her astonishment, she also found romance and contentment. All her adoring husband asked was that she give him her unswerving love and loyalty and agree to know nothing – absolutely nothing – about his business.

Susan Dworkin wrote the New York Times best-seller, The Nazi Officer’s Wife, a story of love and terror in the Third Reich, with the woman who lived it, the late Edith Hahn Beer. Other books include Making Tootsie, the inside story of the great film comedy with Dustin Hoffman and Sydney Pollack; The Viking in the Wheat Field, about the eminent seed banker Dr. Bent Skovmand; Miss America 1945, Bess Myerson’s Own Story; Stolen Goods, a novel of love and larceny in the 80s, and The Commons, a novel about an agrarian revolt led by a pop star and set in the not too distant future. She was a long-time contributing editor to Ms. Magazine. Her plays have been performed in regional and off-Broadway theatres. She lives in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts.

Susan Dworkin’s work has the ability to draw us into new dreams of justice, and to make them irresistibly practical, humorous and human.

Cathy Fiorello takes us back in time, telling her story in the framework of historic events. Her characters live valiantly in threatening times: the hardships of life in Brooklyn during the Great Depression, the shock of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the stress of the war that followed it, and the aftermath of 9/11,
which ushered in an America that would never again be the safe world she grew up in.

Along the way, we celebrate her successes as she reaches for a life beyond the boundaries for a woman of her time. We root for her as she defies the constraints of ageism, pulls up roots in her seventies, and jump starts her life in the laissez-faire culture of San Francisco. When we last meet Cathy, she is still asking, “What’s next?” This is a coming-of-age story for readers of all ages.

In her beautifully written memoir, Fiorello takes us on a journey deep into her past. Standing at the Edge of the Pool is a memoir with a big heart – and a savvy and irresistible narrator.

— Melissa Cistaro, Pieces of My Mother

Standing at the Edge of the Pool is stunning. Fiorello lets the reader into her world. We rejoice with her, we cry with her, we applaud her resolve to live the life she wants. Every woman hesitating to take a risk should read this memoir.

— Barbara Rose Brooker, The Viagra Diaries

I wanted to hug this book.

— Cheryl McKeon, Manager, Book Passage

Cathy Fiorello is the author of Al Capone Had a Lovely Mother, a memoir set in three cities. A New Yorker by birth, she had a mid-life fling in Paris, and now lives and writes in San Francisco.

It Never Ends: Mothering Middle-Aged Daughters explores the complex challenges and unexpected rewards of aging mothers in their relationships with their midlife daughters. Based on interviews with women between 65 and 85, it illuminates issues of closeness, distance, longing, and need that arise. Mothers speak openly about the ongoing effects of the past on the present, the cultural, familial, and interpersonal conflicts that remain, and the varied and often invisible ways they continue mothering.

A rich, thoughtful, multi-layered look into the ways that mothers experience their relationships variously with love, joy, fulfillment, sorrow, anguish and longing…

Discovering Senior Space: A Memoir is not an academic book but was written for a general audience. It was precipitated by Juhasz’ retirement at 64, when she suddenly became aware of living in what she calls “senior space”: the moment in time between middle age and old age. Here she began to experience confusion, a sense of instability, and most importantly, questions about her own identity. Yet the messages that she heard were either dismissive, as in “You’re no different from before,” or “Sixty is the new 40” or unrelentingly positive: “Now you can be anyone you want to be!” Few spoke to her own experience. In this memoir she seeks a more relevant understanding of senior space and consequently this particular moment of aging. From the present she moves to the past, looking at her life from the vantage point of daughter, granddaughter, mother, grandmother, lover, teacher, and writer. Through stories and reflection, she explores the threads of her earlier identity and how they are woven together to see how they might help to define who she is today and how she can live fully.

Suzanne Juhasz is a retired Professor of English and Women’s Studies from the University of Colorado, Boulder. In many books and essays she has written on women writers (especially Emily Dickinson), feminist theory, psychology, queer theory, and sometimes ballet. She has published two essays in Persimmon Tree: “Classroom Ballerina: The Sequel” (Winter 2013) and “Feminism’s Many Facets: A Response to Vivian Gornick” (Summer 2015).

Seeking essays from women of all ages, races, and sexual orientations who have experienced bullying during their developmental years from other girls or who have been victims in their adulthood of aggressive, demeaning, or disempowering behavior from other women.

The ideal essay will include observations about the emotional impact such experiences have had.

Word limit: 1000.

For additional information and to submit your essay, CLICK HERE.
Please put “Anthology” in the title line and the title in the body of the essay.

Unmasked is intended to surprise, inform and encourage all women of a certain age to (re)discover their sexuality. In a society that reveres youth – and particularly young, sexy women – little attention is paid to sex and intimacy among women in later life. Unmasked gives women from around the world an opportunity to share their stories.

This collection of 32 poems and 21 essays features works by women who are published writers and also mothers, grandmothers, playwrights, professors, teachers, psychotherapists, copywriters, city councilwomen, and a model for a foot fetish website. They come from places as diverse as Australia, California, Delaware, Iowa, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Washington, Wisconsin, and the United Kingdom, among others. Many have prestigious fellowships and Pushcart Prize nominations and other awards to their names. They range in age from 50 to 87, and reflect the full spectrum of race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status.

Unmasked is a diverse array of perspectives… each unique enough to keep readers intrigued. A refreshingly blunt chorus of older women’s voices.

—Kirkus Reviews

Sex for women after 50 is invisible for the same reason that contraception, abortion, and sex between two women or two men has been forbidden: Sexuality is supposed to be only about procreation. This lie was invented by patriarchy, monotheism, racism, and other hierarchies. Sexuality is and always has been also about bonding, communicating, and pleasure. Unmasked helps to restore a human right.

When my son let me know he was caught in addiction, almost ten years ago, I was devastated. The economic crash, loss of his company, injured back, pain pills, heroin, loss of his wife and kids, were classic. I took him in, he cleaned up, relapsed, cleaned up, relapsed and had to live elsewhere. The story is beyond painful and sad. He wasn’t getting the help he needed. I could feed him, but I was his mother, not doctor and counselor. As his kids suffered missing him, and help from me wasn’t helping, he drifted away, barely in touch. As a poet, my response was to write my grief and experience and to share the stories at readings and in publications. I sought to break the stigma and silence by speaking out. Eventually, I took a form I was teaching, the abcdarien, and used it to generate poems and stories. I learned truths about myself. I learned about the disease and my own part in my own recovery. I learned how to love myself and my son in spite of the illness that had such destructive power. I gathered and published the collection to share what I discovered about loving an addict, someone with substance use disorder. The book ends with a statement from him written for his own healing while in rehab. He allowed me to share it as an epilogue.

The poems and prose in this book created a current of images and feelings that caught me up and swept me along in an unexpected journey. Notes on Serenity: An ABC of Addictionby Merimée Moffitt, is a rich and lyrical collection that offers an authentic voice for those who struggle with addiction.

— Martha Meacham, Story Circle Network

Merimée lives in New Mexico where she writes and teaches writing in her community.

Nice Nipper is part memoir, part novella–two accounts written seven decades apart by a mother and daughter. Their stories dovetail together as the daughter travels back in time to be an invisible participant in her mother’s childhood in 1920s Marylebone, London, giving a different take on “Back to the Future”.

Mira Harmer was one of ten siblings brought up over a second-hand furniture shop in a condemned slum building, and her account – which is memoir written as fiction – centers around her own mother giving birth for the 15th and last time (five children died). As a backdrop she provides a fascinating insight into early 20th-century schooldays, when, for families like theirs, having a bathroom was an unimaginable luxury and where the girls wore their Guide uniforms for best when visitors came.

Seventy years later, suffering from dementia in a nursing home, Mira believed she was a schoolgirl once again and her reclaimed 14-year-old self sees the matron as headmistress and the nurses as teachers. “This is my new green uniform,” she said proudly. Then she lowered her voice conspiratorially, “The teachers wear blue, you know….”

Julie Norton’s account relates Mira’s day-to-day experiences and encounters at the nursing home where Mira believes her daughter is her sister, and confusing conversations ensue where they are talking at cross purposes across the years.

Alicia Ostriker’s artistic and intellectual productions as a poet, critic, and essayist over the past 50 years are protean and have been profoundly influential to generations of readers, writers, and critics. In all her writings, both the feminist and the human, engage fiercely with the material and metaphysical world. Ostriker is a poet concerned with questions of social justice, equality, religion and spirituality, relationships, and how to live in a world marked by both beauty and tragedy.

Everywoman Her Own Theology: On the Poetry of Alicia Suskin Ostriker engages Ostriker’s poetry from throughout her career, including her first volume Songs, her award-winning collection The Imaginary Lover, and her more recent work in the collections No Heaven, the volcano sequence, The Book of Seventy,The Old Woman, the Tulip and the Dog, and Waiting for the Light. Like her literary criticism and essays, Ostriker’s poetry explores themes of feminism, Jewish life, family, and social justice.

With insightful essays-—some newly written for this collection-—poets and literary critics including Toi Derricotte, Daisy Fried, Cynthia Hogue, Tony Hoagland, and Eleanor Wilner illuminate and open new pathways for critical engagement with Alicia Ostriker’s lifetime of poetic work.

Martha Nell Smith is Professor of English and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland. Her publications include Emily Dickinson: A User’s Guide and Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Dickinson.

Julie R. Enszer teaches at the University of Mississippi and is the author of four poetry collections: Avowed, Lilith’s Demons, Sisterhood, and Handmade Love. She edits and publishes Sinister Wisdom, a multicultural lesbian literary and art journal.

When It’s Over is a literary novel set in Europe during World War II. Coming of age in Prague in the turbulent 1930’s, Lena Kulkova meets Otto, a refugee from Hitler’s Germany, and follows him to Paris to work for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. As the war in Spain ends and a far greater war engulfs the continent, Lena gets stuck in Paris with no news from her Jewish family, including her beloved baby sister, left behind in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Otto, meanwhile, has fled to England, and urges Lena to join him, but she cannot obtain visa. When they are finally reunited, they face anti-refugee sentiment and wartime deprivations, while Lena is desperate for news from her mother and sister.

In extraordinary times, a single decision can mean the difference between life and death…. When It’s Over brings the forces of history to a very human level.”

—Booklist

When It’s Over was a finalist in the 2018 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards, the Indie Book Awards, the International Book Awards, the Sarton Women’s Book Award, and the American Fiction Award.

Barbara Ridley was born in England but has lived in California for over 35 years. After a successful career as a nurse practitioner, which included publication of academic articles in peer-reviewed journals, she is now focused on creative writing. When It’s Over is her debut novel and is based on her mother’s story.

A rural road in the Sierra Foothills of California sets the stage for Blind Shady Bend, a novel in which Hannah Blackwell, approaching her 70th birthday, inherits a decrepit piece of country property. Widowed young, and caretaker to her parents until their deaths, her uneventful life suddenly takes a sharp turn when she receives this surprising bequest from a renegade brother who had disappeared from her life decades earlier.

While reason tells Hannah to get rid of the place, her curiosity keeps pushing her further into exploring her brother’s abandoned parcel. As she searches for clues of his checkered past, she inadvertently stumbles into an unexpected future.

Blind Shady Bend tells the story of ordinary people whose lives can change radically and passionately, no matter how stuck they may feel, no matter their age.

Utterly engaging, at times mesmerizing, addictive and magical.

—Jennifer Word, Goodreads reviewer

It is wonderful to have a ‘mature’ woman as the heroine of a contemporary novel….Her voice is as inspiring as her story.

—Jane Stallman, Berkeley Book Club

Deftly crafted from beginning to end, Blind Shady Bend is a rewarding and thoroughly entertaining read.

—Midwest Book Review

Bay Area author Adina Sara has published two essay collections, and is currently completing a family memoir.

Five women writers met at a writing workshop to explore their mothers’ lives. The questions raised were so intriguing they formed a writing group to continue the work. Compassionate Journey: Honoring Our Mothers’ Stories is the fruit of their efforts, an anthology of essays along with a writing guide for others wishing to share the journey, one which led these writers to a more compassionate understanding of both their mothers and themselves.

I was deeply moved by this book.

—Monica Wood, When We Were the Kennedys and The-One-In-A-Million Boy

This rich collection of mother stories abounds with compassion and nostalgia and insight about all that it means to be a daughter born of a mother….We can read it to understand more about what it means to be a woman.

—Susan Conley, The Foremost Good Fortune and Paris Was the Place

This is an exceptional read. The five women authors have created something new and startling here, a testimony of their own hearts and an invitation to all writers. This is a remarkable anthology, and even more remarkable in its generous invitation to all writers to make this same journey.

—Meredith Hall, Without a Map: A Memoir

This remarkable collection is a love story to women searching for a way to make peace with their mothers. Compassionate Journeybelongs on every woman’s bookshelf.

A novel inspired by the legendary spiritual master, Rabbi Yisroel ben Eliezar, known as the Baal Shem Tov, the Good Master of the Name, who beckoned forth love from the hearts of rag pickers, ruby merchants, midwives, and murderers.

Poor orphan. Simpleton. Harder to tame than the wind. He hears what they call him. But he listens to the presence his father promised would never leave him.

Yisroel finds his way to those who nurture his healing gifts and rare compassion—-until he embraces a destiny he cannot yet fathom nor deny any longer.

Honoring women, children, and the poor as his teachers. Celebrating life’s simplest deeds as worship. Praying with joyous abandon. Loving without condition. Yisroel’s “irreverent” practices threaten the established authorities, among them an embittered rabbinic leader with a mission of his own: to destroy the irrepressible master known as the Baal Shem Tov and his growing community of followers.

Set in the richly textured Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of the 1700s, this exquisite reimagining of one of history’s most revered and revolutionary mystics transports readers back in time to experience the true meaning of power and the timeless grace of love.

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